To some it will be regarded as tantamount to striking an angel to utter any criticism of Sir Alf Ramsey, manager of England from 1963 to 1974. After all, he did help win the World Cup in 1966 - an event fit to rank with Crecy, Agincourt and Waterloo in some minds. But I always disliked the man, the manager and what he stood for.

There are three counts in my indictment: he was a humourless boor, he was the epitome of negativity and his legend far outstrips his actual achievement. No man without a sense of humour is ever any damn good, and Ramsey raised humourlessness to a fine art. He liked to talk in a clipped, pedantic manner that he presumably mistook for style, but the only amusing thing about him was the way he mangled the English language. 'Inasmuch as' became in Ramseyspeak 'inasmuch that' and he invariably called what everyone else termed the World Cup 'the World Cup competition' as if the final noun conveyed an extra layer of meaning.

As a manager, Ramsey turned football into a negative contest of attrition, predicated on the massed defence. Watch any England game from his era and it always appears that there are at least 22 white shirts clustered around the penalty area. The Ramsey method was simple: defend in such depth that the opposition eventually becomes exhausted or just plain bored, and then one of the mediocre England forwards can slip out and score a single goal. This was why so many of these games ended 1-0, one way or the other. European Nations Cup 1968: England 1 Spain 0; England 0 Yugoslavia 1. World Cup 1970: England 1 Czechoslovakia 0; England 1 Romania 0; England 0 Brazil 1.

To hammer home the point that defence was everything, Ramsey liked to employ a particularly thuggish sort of 'stopper', best typified by midfielder Norbert ('Nobby') Stiles and defender Norman 'Bites Your Legs' Hunter, whose contribution to the beautiful game was to lame the Yugoslavia star Ivica Osim in the 1968 European Championship game. Ramsey, on the whole, had no time for exciting players and was always suspicious of the flamboyant Jimmy Greaves. Thanks to Ramsey the idea caught on that it doesn't matter how excruciatingly tedious a game is as long as you win. The 'professional foul', the offside trap and the whole panoply of teams essentially lacking in skill were part of his legacy. I have long believed that the only way to deal with Ramsey and his negative, defensive heirs is to abolish the absurd offside rule, widen the pitch and widen the goals.

But it is the 1966 'triumph' that seems to me the most unacceptable part of the Ramsey legend. The plain truth is that the 1966 competition was third in banality only to the fiascos of 1990 and 1994 in the entire history of the World Cup. To win the cup a team needs to have at least half a dozen first-class players. Ramsey had but three - Banks, Charlton and Moore - and faced the problem of how to parlay this into a winning combination.

There were in fact four better teams than England in the 1966 finals (Hungary, the Soviet Union, West Germany and Argentina), but the hosts secured a remarkably simple path to the final. England avoided their main rivals in the group stage but then faced a formidable Argentina team, who had qualified with the West Germans, in the quarter-finals. Man for man, the Argentinians were superior to Ramsey's squad and they had in their captain, Antonio Rattin, the finest midfielder in the world at that time. How to sweep away this obstacle? With 10 minutes left in the first half, a German referee sent Rattin off for 'violence of the tongue', even though the referee spoke no Spanish; by this criterion Wayne Rooney would already have been banned for several lifetimes. The 10-man Argentina team struggled on, only to succumb - you've guessed it - 1-0. In a match being played the same day, an English referee sent off two Uruguayans in their match against West Germany, handing the Germans an easy victory.

Coincidence? Many people have thought not. I remember speaking to the great Billy Wright in Bogota in 1970 and he told me that the Rattin dismissal was the most suspicious act he had witnessed in a lifetime of football. The controversy over the final, when England scored a third 'goal' in extra time against Germany, has become a cause célèbre, but video evidence has never established conclusively that it was a goal and more often suggests that it should have been disallowed.

The 1966 World Cup was a murky business that has never been cleared up satisfactorily, but it is on this dubious foundation that Ramsey's reputation as a saviour has been built. Only one World Cup has produced a more obvious example of corruption and that was in 1978, when Peru rolled over and allowed the hosts Argentina to score six goals against them and thus qualify for the final.

It is difficult to see what there is worthwhile about the absurd Ramsey cult that still exerts such a powerful sway. If we are going to accept a humourless, cynical, negative opportunist as one of our sporting heroes, of what calibre will the villains have to be?

· Frank McLynn's latest book is 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (Random House)